4 Mac Alternatives to Adobe Illustrator for Vector Graphic Design

Creating vector-based graphics on the Mac isn’t just Adobe Illustrator’s purview. We rounded up a few great alternatives that let you make your own vector art without breaking the bank.

Affinity Designer

No vector graphics app is completely intuitive, but Affinity Designer comes close. It’s easier to learn than Illustrator even though the app’s feature and tool set is surprisingly complete. It includes adjustment and mask layers, blending modes, a handy split screen mode for displaying your art in different views, responsive design support, and more. Affinity Designer costs US$49.99 and is available on Apple’s Mac App Store.

Affinity Designer

Inkscape

Inkscape is a surprisingly full-features vector graphic editor app, and it’s free. The app was conceived as an open source alternative to Illustrator, and does that really well. Since it’s open source, new features are being added all the time. If you have the coding skills you can contribute to Inkscape’s feature list, too.

Inkscape

Vectr

Vectr is another free vector art app, and it’s much easier to learn than Illustrator. The trade off is that it isn’t a feature-rich as some other options, but that’s OK because the tools beginners and casual users are all there. They offer an app you can download, or a Web interface. The developers say Vectr will always be free, and a paid pro account option with a built-in marketplace is coming at some point.

Vectr

Graphic

Graphic from Indeeo includes a full set of vector drawing tools, supports multiple layers, imports and exports Adobe Photoshop file format, and supports OpenGL for faster rendering. Graphic is priced at $29.99, and there’s also an iPad version for $8.99.

I went with Graphic a couple of years ago. The primary reason was that I wanted to be able to hand documents off between my Mac and iPad. I use it regularly on both platforms. My Christmas card was mostly done with Graphic. Even the freehand drawings from Procreate get tossed into Graphic for finishing, framing, titles, and such. I often do the lettering for my cartoons in Graphic, Graphic reminds me of Canvas in its ability to adjust text. The only thing I wish Graphic had would be a paintbucket/fill option. There are workarounds but they are a bit kludgy and don’t work when I need them. ( Ex, draw a freehand figure eight 8. Now fill in the holes with colour.) Other than that Graphic is great.